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David Neiwert

David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle and the editor of the blog Orcinus. A National Press Club award winner for his reportage on the radical right, he is also the author of three books, most recently Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.

Jim Campbell was a contractor before he became an Arizona retiree, so he happens to know a little about getting construction projects completed. He also happens to be avidly involved in efforts to stem what he and thousands of others see as an unholy tide of illegal immigrants streaming over the U.S.?Mexico border. So when the Minutemen--those "citizen watchdogs" who have been setting up vigilante border patrols throughout the Southwest--announced plans to build a fence along a section of the Arizona-Mexico border, it seemed to Campbell like a good time to step up and make a difference. A couple of years later and $100,000 lighter, Campbell's not so sure it was a good idea. In fact, he calls the people running the Minutemen's border-fence project "a bunch of felons." When he first contacted the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC)--the most prominent of the two major Minutemen organizations and the sponsors of the fence project--in early May 2006, he was enthusiastic about his vision...

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 496 pages) * * * The public understanding of World War II history and its precedents has suffered in recent years from the depredations of revisionist historians -- the David Irvings and David Bowmans of the field who have attempted to recast the meaning of, respectively, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment. Their reach, however, has been somewhat limited to fringe audiences. It might be tempting to throw Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning into those same cloacal backwaters, but there is an essential difference that goes well beyond the likely much broader reach of Goldberg's book, which was inexplicably published by a mainstream house (Doubleday). Most revisionists are actually historians with some credentials, and their theses often hinge on nuances and the...